Why do people talk? That is the central question of this blog: what was the purpose of the utterance, the first time somebody said something? I have been taking it for granted that the first intention was informative, as in enemy or carcass thataway. But other ambitions are possible. Maybe language began with a curse or a prayer. I seem to recall reading in Stephen Pinker that cursing uses a different part of the brain, so perhaps we can toss that purpose aside. But was the first utterance a prayer?

That doesn’t look impossible. Imagine Homo earlymus on a vast, grassy plain surrounded by barking hyenas. It looks like a good time for a prayer. But prayers require a concept of at least a higher power, and such a concept seems unlikely to arise without there already being a language with which to work out the notion of some kind of power to pray to. It seems a secondary reason to speak, that is a reason to be discovered by a person already endowed with speech.

Actually, it seems like a tertiary reason. You have language (for whatever purpose) and then you develop the ability to work or reason out such things as there must be a god of the hyenas, and then you start praying to said god to call off his earthly manifestations. But if prayer is too advanced a reason for using language, we cannot assume our ancestor trapped on the African savanna was forced into silence. He/She might have cried out with some sort of magical purpose – say abracadabra and the hyenas will leave. Yet even that seems a bit too advanced for the first use of language. Ancestors surrounded by yelping hyenas may have cried in despair or shrieked in horror, but these sorts of emotional ejaculations are too primitive to be called language. It’s more of a joke than anything else to propose that the first linguistic utterance was Oh no!

Magic, by the way, may have led to the whole range of speech acts in which people do accomplish effects by using words as in marrying someone or promising to do something. I don’t think I can rule out on first principles that the first word wasn’t something like Selah or something similar said to seal a new relationship.

Another use of language that requires pre-existing speech is signaling attention. One person may be telling a story (using language to amuse) while a listener periodically says un hunh or wow or I see. These interjections are socially important, but by definition require speech to have already existed before they were introduced into human communications.

Some people have suggested, tongue a bit in cheek, that language began as a method of deceiving others. Ogg said carcass thataway, when really it was t’otherway so Ogg could have the whole feast to his greedy self. The argument against deception as the original purpose is that language would never have survived if it had been lies from the beginning. For it to become an essential part of our lives, it had to be useful so that we kept language even as we recognized speech meant we would be surrounded by liars. This same argument can be used to dismiss a variety of anti-social purposes behind speech. Donald Trump often uses language to confuse people and situations, but if the first speaker had been a prehistoric Trump, language would have died aborning.

Trump also uses language to splinter a group, as happened in his announcement of his candidacy, when he denounced Mexican immigrants, costing him the support of one group but winning the support of anti-immigrant voters. Might the first word have been the prehistoric equivalent of wetback? It ousted one group while increasing the solidarity of another.

Language does not have to divide if it is to solidify. Many politicians are able to increase solidarity without splintering. The finest example is probably Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which does a splendid job of giving friends of the Union cause some principles to rally around yet the speech never attacks the Confederacy head on. But Lincoln’s use of language was quite sophisticated and depended upon earlier language. It seems unlikely that the first words were so independently noble. A more ordinary way of increasing solidarity is through social customs such as saying thank you or hello. I can't rule out Thanks as the first word, though if it was, it took a second reason for people to realize how useful language could be.

Other possible first uses might be as a command such as go with finger pointed toward the horizon, or as a request this time with the finger pointed toward a table top while the pointer utters salt. These kinds of usages, however, remind me of the old bow-wow theories of language origins that got the inquiry into such ill repute to begin with. It’s not that these usages are impossible, although they are impossible to prove/disprove, but they offer no clue as to how language got from such an unpromising start to the wonder that it is today.

Tom Wolfe wrote a book a year or so ago in which he had the unusual suggestion that language began as a way of improving one’s memory, and there is no doubt that naming aids in one’s memory. If you want to describe the route from New York City to Boston, it helps if you have names to remind you of the places in between. But that explanation is based on the out of date belief that language is naming. It is more than that. When Adam named the giraffe a giraffe he still needed verbs to tell us something about the giraffe and prepositions to locate it. When trying to understand where language came from, it is best to recall what language does in the first place.

So where does that leave us? Promising first uses may have been to inform, or to perform a speech act, or to splinter a group. The other uses seem to depend on language already existing, or point to dead ends.

*****

Note: I have put in bold-underline the various uses I see for language: inform/deceive; amuse/confuse; pray/curse; increase solidarity/splinter a group; perform magic; perform a speech act; give names; signal attention; request; work or reason out a notion; emotional ejaculation; command. What have I left out?

A few years back Derek Bickerton published a book called Adam's Tongue which I reviewed in three posts (here, here and here). That book was disappointingly breezy, a lively account that made bold assertions and brushed objections aside with the swat of a hand. Say this for the guy, he's willing to keep plugging. Earlier this year he published an entirely non-breezy account of his theory: More than Nature Needs — Language, Mind, and Evolution. After reading the book I went back and read my old posts on the first work. I find that the theory has changed only a bit but the process is much more clear.

Step 1 – Escape from the here and now

His theory still begins with the rise of the African savanna about 2 million years ago. The human lineage of that time was unable to bring down much game and was forced to feed on the conveniently dead. That task involved "confrontational scavenging" for driving off others from the scene. Groups of protohumans worked as a team, fending off the other scavengers. These rivals, by the way, include lions, hyenas, wild dogs, jackals, large birds of various sorts like vultures and marabou storks, and the occasional leopard and cheetah. Some of these animals, notably lions and hyenas, might not have been so easy to chase off. Just as today you can see hyenas keeping their distance while the lions feed, our ancestors may have had to wait patiently while the big boys satisfied themselves. Anyway, there seems no reason to doubt that our ancestors did a lot of scavenging of the confrontational kind, and when confronting stronger rivals, it helps to be more than one.

Bickerton compares the task of scavenging to that of a bee that has found a flower field. The bee flies back to the hive and "recruits" others by telling them where the flowers are to be found. The same thing happened on the savanna. An ancestor found a carcass and returned to recruit others to join in on the confrontation. The recruitment was originally accomplished by a combination of grunts and gestures, anything that would get the idea across. It reminds me a bit of the scenes in faithful-dog movies where the boy says, "I think Shep wants us to go with her." It would be unfair to press hard for details, but there is one thing I think needs clarification. Which came first, the cooperation or the recruiting? After all, bees don't just go looking for any old bees to join in on the pollenating. They return to an existing hive with an already established eusocial order. I don't have the citation, but I'm guessing the eusociality is older than the bee's waggle dance.

I have been to a surprisingly large number of settings that include carcass, scavenger, and savanna. The confrontations are not just between species. Hyenas quarrel amongst themselves as well. It is not at all unusual to see a hyena steal a meaty leg from a fellow hyena. Humans are really unusual in the way we are most social over meals, the time other animals are most individual. So this theory of Bickerton's needs some tightening about the rise of human communities.

None the less, just as bees can tell other bees about flowers off somewhere beyond bee senses, our ancestors began to tell one another of carcasses to be found yonder.

Step 2 – Brain changes

Presumably the gestures and grunts beckoning to a distant carcass quickly became stereotyped so that something like ooog meant big carcass and baaa meant little carcass. Symbolism of this sort arises naturally because the words mean something that must be evoked rather than pointed at. So there is no need for a genetic mutation to support symbolic thinking. Likewise, the brain is plastic enough to reform synapses and make efficient circuitry so that symbols can be generated and understood more quickly and efficiently than at the start. Thus, we do not need natural selection to account for quicker use of symbols.

On the other hand, the brain did not just reorganize itself to handle symbolic circuitry. The fossil evidence is as clear as it can be that the brain grew, and grew rapidly. Growth like that does not just happen. In terms of energy, the brain is a very expensive organ. Any growth in the brain constitutes a permanent commitment to supplying the extra energyneeded to support it. To keep that commitment (a) new energy sources must be found, and/or (b) the body has to make a trade-off and reduce the energy expended elsewhere. We probably did some trade-off; our arms, for example, are much weaker than ape arms. But apes are already pretty smart and have made most of the trade-offs than can be made without reducing their survivability.

New energy sources could come from increased meat eating, cooking the food, and the benefits of cooperation. But new energy sources don't automatically lead to increased brain size. Lots of organs have evolved to bigger size. Wrens and storks have similar feet, but the stork's is much bigger. That is accomplished, not by redesigning the foot so much as by building it for a longer period of time. The stop-growing-feet button is not pressed until much later than the wren's. If we assume something similar lies behind our brain growth, there must have been a similar delay in pressing the stop-growing-a-brain button. That kind of change demands some alteration of the DNA and the preservation of the change demands selection. That pressure for growth may not have been language, but our ancestors were pressed to get smarter. An automatic rewiring of the brain cannot be the whole story.

Also, language does not live by symbolism alone. The original carcass-recruiting pidgin that Bickerton imagines had a natural limit. There was a vocabulary for carcasses: zebra, gazelle, giraffe… on up to some small number. There might be another warning vocabulary: be on the lookout for lions, hyenas… and on to some small number. A third vocabulary might be devoted to directions: that way, by the hill, near the stream… on up to some finite number. So a savanna dweller could report: zebra, beware of lions and hyenas, that way near the stream. That pretty well covers the news. We would now be as advanced as bees with a waggle dance.

Bees went no further. "But," says Bickerton,, "the effects of displacement or organisms with minuscule brains must surely be different in brains that are orders of magnitude bigger, that can hold finely dissected descriptions of the world…" [chap. 9]. But it takes more than big brains to go beyond the waggle dance. You have to introduce new topics. Bees never waggle a route to a fine view of the valley. They don't care about that. Now suppose the savanna scavenger is amused to see a zebra chase off two lions and a hyena. He has the words and gestures to report the incident to his fellows, but why should he add a new topic? Something like that must have happened, however, for languages grow more by adding new topics than by dissecting existing ones. Bickerton pays no attention to the growth of topics, let alone the growth of kinds of topics that require subjective awareness and metaphors.

Did you notice the ellipsis at the end of the passage I quoted? Let's peek at the rest of Bickerton's sentence. Humans did better than bees because, "… [they] constantly engage in something unknown to ants and bees, rich and varied patterns of social interaction between highly individuated animals." So without the familiar by-your-leave he has slipped in the whole of human community—the trust, the gossip, the moral codes, the resolution of hurt feelings, and the finding of new things to talk about. He just takes the whole communal society for granted. Was there no involvement of language in any of that? At one point he grumbles about "vague" theories of co-evolution of language and humanity, but he really cannot get away with just brushing aside the transition from savanna scavengers to biologically-unique, human communities.

Yet brushing the whole thing aside is exactly what he tries to do. From two million to one hundred and fifty thousand years ago we had scavengers, symbols, and brain plasticity.

Step 3 – Buy into Chomsky

Then came a step beyond placing words one after another like beads on a string: the emergence of universal grammar with its hierarchical structure.

So at the end that Bickerton reveals himself to be less than a full heretic in Chomsky's Church. He believes externalization came first in the form of a protolanguage, but buys most of the rest. Chomsky calls the emergence of universal grammar "a great leap forward." Bickerton likens it to riding an escalator, and he buys Chomsky's main points: that the reorganized brain is more efficient at thought than at communicating (i.e., telling one another things), that a universal grammar is language-exclusive, and that natural selection wasn't necessary for the coming of a universal grammar. (He does offer, by the way, an invaluably succinct account of universal grammar.)

I could go into more detail, but just last month I posted reports (here and here) on a paper by Maggie Tallerman that rebuts the points, so why bother repeating them? I have always loved Bickerton's work on creole languages and feel utterly let down by the impoverished view of humanity that he and Chomsky espouse. Creationists may think that natural selection devalues humanity, but it is really physicalism without selection that sells us for scrap.

One of the big quarrels in the study of speech origins is over whether it is relatively new (about 100,000 years) or decently old (millions of years). This blog has consistently leaned toward the old origins story.

Basically, every time there is evidence of a complex genetic history, it's a point for old origins and every time there is evidence of a straight cultural story or one mutation does all, newbies look better.

Human societies are quite distinct from chimps and gorillas. We are cooperative and modular, building up relationships across groups.

The study reports: Social structure does not change readily with the environment (presumably because the structure is genetically programmed); complex behavior does not evolve step by step (allowing for a genetically based, complex difference between chimps and us); and brains do not get bigger to handle larger social groups (challenging Robin Dunbar's theory that the human big brain and language origins reflects our larger groupings).

In the old days I would have raised a few questions about this study, but today I'm just going to say read the story. I read it while taking the train to work this morning and want to bring it to your attention this evening, before I fall into my bed.

I've held many consulting positions while working on this blog but now I have one that includes 4 hours of commuting each day, meaning that most of my non-working life is put on hold for the weekends, especially during World Series week. Typically I work on this blog on weekends, but I cannot do that and have the rest of my life. So I think I'll take a break. After 5 years and a book I've covered a lot of ground. In this post I'm putting a bit of what I learned into scenario form.

As I see it there were several stages in speech origins. The first was a long period of vocalizing in which emotions were shared but not named. Then came a word/phrase period, followed by true sentences (subject + predicate). These first languages were likely very concrete and only later developed metaphorical and abstract capabilities.

Vocalizing probably began around 3.3 million years ago when, according to louse DNA information, our bodies had become hairless enough to support two distinct forms of lice. (see: Lousy Timelines) Hairless primates have a problem because they cannot form social bonds via grooming and their young cannot hang onto their mothers' hair. Robin Dunbar and Dean Falk have done good work in this area. Falk especially has analyzed the development of vocalizations that are not words.

As to why we became hairless, I don't know. I don't know why we are bipedal either, but balding mammals are not unknown in African woodlands. Elephants, rhino, and wild pigs also have little hair. Presumably the process of losing hair was accompanied by the counterprocess of making up for hair's disappearing social benefits. Mothers and infants maintained contact vocally while the mother put the infant on the ground. Adults vocalized together while grooming faded.

A vocalization period persists to this day in infants and is generally seen as a movement toward speech, but that goal may reflect the prejudice of speakers. A great deal of emotional development goes on during this vocalizing and the process needn't look to future language for justification. Myself, I suspect that there was a period of more than a million years during which the human lineage had its own distinctive birdlike nature—no flying, but plenty of chirping.

The vocalization-only period began when the lineage was likely some species of Australopithecus and ended after the rise of the Homo genus. This critical period saw the emergence of the African savanna and our lineage's adaption to the new environment. One important adaptation was the formation of cooperative communities, something very rare amongst mammals who are more given to herding and forming hierarchical societies whose members are unwilling to share what they know. On the open plains, however, slow, weak humans have no hope of survival in herds or even the more complex ape societies. They stood together or went extinct.

The oldest Homo known are about 2.7/2.8 million years old and sometime after that members of the lineage began using their vocalizations to name things. The first words were probably formed by random associations. I've seen infants in their first year do the same thing, making what I call "toy words" by themselves. Most such words fade, but a few are picked up by the family. I seem to recall a baseball player in the 1960s and 70s named Boog Powell and, supposedly, the nickname Boog came from a word he had used as a baby.

The critical step in the word origin was not the association of sound with thing—that's pretty much inevitable with a brainy species doing a lot of free form vocalizing. The key lay in others being willing to repeat somebody's association, and that willingness comes only when individuals are already motivated to share knowledge. Once word sharing had begun, Baldwinian evolutionary processes would support the development of an instinct to learn and use each other's words.

The critical evolutionary step was the rise of a cooperative genus and not some new semantic or syntactical intelligence. Apes are already able to associate a number of hand signs with specific things and focus their attention on a named object. What they needed was a reason to make use of that capacity.

How much more did Homo biology have to change once the lineage got to that point where it could name things?

One step was discussed in last week's post, the ability to combine two phrases into a whole. Apes cannot do this, and the reason is not hard to grasp. Two distinct phrases—e.g., that red ball and a blond lumberjack—direct attention in two separate directions. But we can combine the two by finding a common verb that unites them: a blond lumberjack kicked that red ball. So that seems to be an intellectual power that we have and apes do not. Our thinking in this regard is not just a scaled up ape ability; it is something new. Language, as we know it today, reveals a discontinuity between humans and apes.

From time to time I read a paper or get a comment saying that discontinuities in biology are impossible because evolution works in small steps, but today's world is full of such breaks. An obvious example is in the world of birds. They have a complex evolutionary history related to the dinosaurs, but the dinosaurs are long dead so when you look at the world today there is a huge discontinuity between birds and other animals we see. Similarly, the intense group selection that was part of the evolution of the human lineage appears to have left us without any race that can speak phrases but not sentences.

There is, however, an equally important continuum from words to phrases to sentences. The evolutionary process has not led us away from the early association between words and attention toward some more abstract syntactical and semantic processes; it moves in the opposite direction—toward more elaborate powers of attention.

When the transfer to full sentences occurred is uncertain. Last week's post noted a possibly relevant genetic doubling 2.4 million years ago, so we can put that as the earliest possible date (and frankly I don't believe the lineage was even using words back that far). Archaeological evidence puts the possible date as early as 1.8 million years ago when Acheulian axes first appeared. These are the first bifaced tools in the record, meaning both sides of a chopper have been worked to form a cutting edge. To make the axe, an artisan must be able to hold two points of attention in mind at the same time. If you are smart enough to join two sides of a stone by making an edge, you may be smart enough to join two phrases with a verb. Let's say that by 1 million years ago Homo erectus was speaking full, concrete sentences. I don't think it could be much later than that.

There is, of course, a big difference between the ability to speak about concrete things and what modern language can achieve. Is that all the result of cultural evolution? I doubt it. I think in particular some biological change was necessary to support metaphors and perhaps abstractions. Whatever that took, I figure that the biological determinants of modern language were in place by 150 thousand years ago. Although some people still date language as recently as 60 thousand years ago, my 150 K date is reasonably orthodox. There are quarrels over whether anything came earlier or if language sprung de novo out of a 'great leap forward' [i.e., a genetic mutation] of some kind. I'm firmly in the long-history camp.

I defend my position by noting the way we put abstractions and metaphors into concrete form. If we began right away using abstract symbols, I doubt that we would have organized abstractions so insistently in perceptual space, as every language on earth does. Instead, I think language would have a much more mathematical flavor. With something like Dirac's equation we can calculate quantum physics outcomes without having any perceptual understanding of what is going on. That means we cannot discuss the results meaningfully in ordinary language. Physicists talk about superposition, collapse, and entanglement but nobody can explain those terms. The reason for the failure is clear enough. Language organizes things according to a perceptible space; Dirac's equation does not.

A good discipline for anyone interested in writing is to try to write a purely concrete paragraph that hangs together. The tone tends toward that of a hard-boiled crime story for there are no abstractions or interior goals. Emotions are external. Someone can shake but not feel fear. There are no motives, only actions. Without metaphors we can never get into somebody's head or heart.

Metaphors are often defined as a "figure of speech" that says one thing is another thing. When it came to the honor of France, General de Gaulle was a lion in defense of his pride. There is a metaphor (and a pun too) used figuratively. You could just as easily say he was "like a lion in defense of his pride," turning the figure into a simile. But there are some metaphors that cannot be deflated. Her flirtatious behavior shattered his trust. Here the metaphor is shattered and no non-metaphor can be substituted.

Why not? Because trust is a psychological state, not a concrete thing. We can substitute a concrete thing for trust. We might belong to a culture that locates trust in the heart, so we could say shattered his heart but now we've replaced a metaphor with a metaphorical phrase since a shattered heart cannot be taken literally. Instead of calling this sort of phrasing "speaking poetically" we might say the user is speaking psychologically, for there is no way to talk about subjective psychological states without using metaphors (or, if you happen to be a professional psychologist, empty jargon).

How do we understand metaphors of subjective experience? In my own case it seems to me that the word directs my attention to my own knowledge of the experience and if I have no acquaintance with some subjective experience I don't know what the metaphor is about. As I have gotten older, much literature has become more clear to me.

Autistic people are reported to be baffled by metaphors, suggesting that there is some biological contribution to understanding them. Perhaps they cannot direct their attention inward. Naturally there is more to autism than understanding metaphors and I'm not suggesting Homo erectus was autistic.

Wherever metaphors come from, they allow us to speak of invisible things as though they were part of the concrete world. In fact, many people don't even realize they are using language in a way that demands interpretation rather than literal acceptance. I have spoken to many people who get indignant when I point out that nobody takes the Biblical reference to God hardening pharaoh's heart literally. Pharaoh's heart did not literally become like a rock or something. Yet language treats it as though and to understand that statement you have to know the feeling of a "hardening heart." It is not the feeling of a heart attack, but something else.

A second feature of modern language not present in concrete speech is the use of abstractions. We live in a world of abstract references. To take an example almost at random, look at Paul Krugman's column in the New York Times last Friday. Here is a purely abstract sentence (for emphasis, I'm putting all the abstractions in blue).

So a crisis brought on by deregulation becomes a reason to move even further to the right…

You have to be pretty comfortable with abstract words to follow that clause, and yet it feels almost normal because of all the structural components that give it a concrete context: brought on by, becomes, move even further. I can imagine some verbose Home erectus saying something similar: So a rainstorm brought on by dark clouds made us move even further into the cave. Thus, we have the paradox of organizing very modern ideas using verbal structures that may have been recognized a million years ago.

Whether this rise in abstractions required a biological change is uncertain. I have the impression that the change has happened so recently that it is essentially cultural and depends heavily on intensive education. Until very recently many abstractions were dealt with mythologically, presenting ideas in the form of living spirits. But there may be a biological component to the process as well. If there is, it was likely added a while back since everybody in the world today can speak of abstractions like justice, freedom, and rights.

The relation between perception and language is not news. The oldest advice given writers is Show; don't tell. In other words, make it as concrete as possible. Now that I have spent five years focusing on the origins of speech, it makes perfect sense to me, and I will end this period of maintaining my blog with a passage from my book that sums up what I have come to understand about language. Because of language we are presented with

a true biological novelty: a cooperative species able to share perception of a topic by directing attention with words. It is almost as though our lineage developed a new sense, a cooperative sense that for the first time let individuals know what another sees, hears, or even feels.

Victoria Falls on the Zambia/Zimbabwe border is near the location where the Last Common Language was spoken.

Science magazine's latest issue has a paper reporting that the Last Common Language was spoken in Africa before Homo sapiens migrated to other parts of the world. All exisiting languages are descended from this one, according to a New Zealand psychologist, Quentin D. Atkinson.

Heroes often begin as simple people who pass a test like pulling a sword from a stone and then become the giants we know. Scientists have to be careful that they don't tell that kind of origins story themselves.

Stephen Jay Gould used the sneering phrase, "just-so stories," that reduced evolutionary narratives to the level of amusing children's tales penned by Rudyard Kipling. I'll ignore the fact that Kipling's tales are true gifts to literature and keep my eyes focused on the big point: narrative is suspect in a scientific context. They enable "facile verbal arguments" to sound plausible without including evidence or data.

Babies can change their destinies by simply being swtiched around at birth and being raised in a different culture and community.

There are many ways of determining dates for different elements in the origin of speech, but they all rely on circumstantial evidence. This blog has leaned toward a very old date (2 or 3 million years) for the first steps with a long evolutionary tail leading to full speech (sentences, stories, and myths), but there is an alternate interpretation that has a recent date (75 thousand years ago, plus or minus 25 thousand years). In which full speech pops up very quickly. A couple of new papers from Stony Brook's anthropologist/archaeologist John Shea provide new arguments that support the older dates.

Leipzig is an ancient city where important research on human origins continues to be done.

An important review article by Josep Call has appeared in the February issue of Mind and Language bearing the straightforward title, “How Artificial Communication Affects the Communication and Cognition of the Great Apes.” The title suggests an important question for this blog: how much did the human lineage change just by the fact that it had begun speaking? We today have a variety of differences between ourselves and apes. How many of those traits can be attributed to the fact that we speak, and how many required other evolutionary interventions?

Fractals are generated by building on the same equation time and again. Speech is also built by combining sounds time and again. Can one compute the other?

The British journal Science Progress has published a paper by William Abler that tries to derive language origins (and much else) from first principles, the way Euclid deduced his geometry and Newton set forth his Principia. Einstein's first relativity paper also argued from a couple of axioms. I mention Euclid, Newton, and Einstein to show that science can be based on assertions as well as experiments, and also as a caution. It takes a mighty big brain to begin with a priori laws and still get the science right. Abler is betting the farm that he belongs in that class.

Some hoopla today because of a new "integrated" calculation that puts the date of the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees at 8 million years instead of the 5 or 6 million years that has been preferred of late. An integrated calculation means it takes fossils and DNA evidence into account. The 5/6 mya estimate had been based on DNA evidence alone. I have my doubts, but we shall see.